Paraparaumu Beach Golf Club

Alex Russell laid the course out in 1949 on sand at Paraparaumu Beach, 51 kilometres north of Wellington and looking out at Kapiti Island. Russell had won the 1924 Australian Open and worked as Alister MacKenzie's partner; he also built Royal Melbourne's East course, Yarra Yarra and Karrinyup. Twelve New Zealand Opens were played here between 1959 and 2002, more than at any other course. Peter Thomson won the first, beating Kel Nagle 67 to 73 in an eighteen-hole playoff. Bob Charles won by thirteen shots in 1966, Michael Campbell won in 2000, and Craig Parry won in 2002, the year Tiger Woods entered to thank his New Zealand caddie, Steve Williams.

The seventeenth is the hole people remember. The club calls it Taonganui, the jewel: a par four of 404 metres from the back tee, with the green set at an angle to the shot, so the approach has to arrive from the side the pin allows. Miss the surface and the ball is swept into what the club names the valley of despair. The sixth, Whakawareware, sets the opposite examination at 298 metres, short enough to tempt, with a shelf green whose top tier turns par into work. Peter Thomson, who won nine New Zealand Opens, wrote that the wind here would always test a golfer's will.